In our own time, a reversal of the blessing of life has begun: Call it the Cambrian Implosion. This turn raises the increasingly likely prospect—it has almost certainly already occurred—that teachers and professors will command artificial intelligence to grade and comment on papers that were partly or entirely generated by artificial intelligence. This earlier modern world might occasionally have dreamt of Bacon’s empire, but it remained a human world, with human goods. The Cambrian Implosion will probably accelerate in the decades to come, with life, especially human life and all its possibilities, in retreat. It is past time for the Cambrian Implosion to be seen truly, with all its ugly, consumptive power over the primordial blessing of organic life.